Getting started with Jekyll

Jekyll is a static site generator written in Ruby that was released in 2008. It allows you to reuse components without any hassle and suits well if all you need an easy way to publish blog posts or launch simple static websites.

Steps to get going:

1. Install Ruby on your machine. I’m on Windows so I used the installer package: Ruby

2. With Ruby installed, proceeded to install Jekyll:

> gem install jekyll

3. Create a new Jekyll site:

> jekyll new C:/my-path

If you already have an HTML site that you want to convert Jekyll, follow the official Jekyll guide on converting a site to Jekyll.

4. Navigate into your newly created project directory:

> jekyll cd my-path

5. Let Jekyll serve your site on your local machine with:

> jekyll serve

Now you can dive into the Jekyll documentation to learn more about how you can build your site. You should also learn about the Liquid template language which is used in Jekyll. If you come from any of the modern JavaScript frameworks, you will quickly pick up the Liquid syntax which allows you to loop over and conditionally display data in the HTML part of your code. If you have built Shopify storefronts you will be right at home, since Shopify also uses Liquid.

A static site is easy, and often free, to host with several hosting services. If you want to learn how to host your Jekyll site on Netlify, see my post on that here